"I don't hate you." Ellen was slightly mollified. "But when I see
you trying to put your burdens on other people - "

Edith got up then and rather timidly put her arms around Ellen's
neck.

"I love him so, Ellen," she whispered, "and I'll try so hard to
make him happy."

Unexpected tears came into Ellen's eyes. She stroked the girl's
fair hair.

"Never mind," she said. "The Good Man's got a way of fixing things
to suit Himself. And I guess He knows best. We do what it's
foreordained we do, after all."

Mrs. Boyd was sleeping. Edith went back to her sewing. She had
depended all her life on her mother's needle, and now that that
had failed her she was hastily putting some clothing into repair.
In the kitchen near the stove the suit she meant to be married
in was hung to dry, after pressing. She was quietly happy.

Willy Cameron found her there. He told her of Mrs. Davis' death,
and then placed the license on the table at her side.

"1 think it would be better to-morrow, Edith," he said. He glanced
down at the needle in her unaccustomed fingers; she seemed very
appealing, with her new task and the new light in her eyes. After
all, it was worth while, even if it cost a lifetime, to take a
soul out of purgatory.

He went up to his room, and for some time she heard him moving about.
Then she heard the scraping of his chair as he drew it to his desk,
and vaguely wondered. When he came down he had a sealed envelope
in his hand.

"I am going out, Edith," he said. "I shall be late getting back,
and - I am going to ask you to do something for me."

"If I am not back here by two o'clock to-night," he said, "I want
you to open that letter and read it. Then go to the nearest
telephone, and call up the number I've written down. Ask for the
man whose name is given, and read him the message."

"What I really expect," he said, smiling down at her, "is to be
back, feeling more or less of a fool, by eleven o'clock. I'm
providing against an emergency that will almost surely never
happen, and I am depending on the most trustworthy person I know."

Very soon after that he went away. She sat for some time after
he had gone, fingering the blank white envelope and wondering, a
little frightened but very proud of his trust.

Dan came in and went up the stairs. That reminded her of the
dinner, and she sat down in the kitchen with a pan of potatoes
on her knee. As she pared them she sang. She was still singing
when Ellen came back.

Something had happened to Ellen. She stood in the kitchen, her hat
still on, drawing her cotton gloves through her fingers and staring
at Edith without seeing her.

"The devil out of hell that he is." Ellen's voice was terrible.
"And all the time knowing that you - She's at home, the poor child,
and Mademoiselle just sat and cried when she told me. It's a
secret," she added, fiercely. "You keep your mouth shut about it.
She never lived with him. She left him right off. I wouldn't know
it now but the servants were talking about the house being forbidden
to him, and I went straight to Mademoiselle. I said: 'You keep him
away from Miss Lily, because I know something about him.' It was
when I told her that she said they were married."

She went out and up the stairs, moving slowly and heavily. Edith
sat still, the pan on her knee, and thought. Did Willy know? Was
that why he was willing to marry her? She was swept with bitter
jealousy, and added to that came suspicion. Something very near
the truth flashed into her mind and stayed there. ln her
bitterness she saw Willy telling Lily of Akers and herself, and
taking her away, or having her taken. It must have been something
like that, or why had she left him?

But her anger slowly subsided; in the end she began to feel that
the new situation rendered her own position more secure, even
justified her own approaching marriage. Since Lily was gone, why
should she not marry Willy Cameron? If what Ellen had said was
true she knew him well enough to know that he would deliberately
strangle his love for Lily. If it were true, and if he knew it.

She moved about the kitchen, making up the fire, working
automatically in that methodless way that always set Ellen's teeth
on edge, and thinking. But subconsciously she was listening, too.
She had heard Dan go into his mother's room and close the door.
She was bracing herself against his coming down.

Dan was difficult those days, irritable and exacting. Moody, too,
and much away from home. He hated idleness at its best, and the
strike was idleness at its worst. Behind the movement toward the
general strike, too, he felt there was some hidden and sinister
influence at work, an influence that was determined to turn what
had commenced as a labor movement into a class uprising.

That very afternoon, for the first time, he had heard whispered the
phrase: "when the town goes dark." There was a diabolical
suggestion in it that sent him home with his fists clenched.

He did not go to his mother's room at once. Instead, he drew a
chair to his window and sat there staring out on the little street.
When the town went dark, what about all the little streets like
this one?

After an hour or so of ominous quiet Edith heard him go into his
mother's room. Her hands trembled as she closed her door.

She heard him coming down at last, and suddenly remembering the
license, hid it in a drawer. She knew that he would destroy it if
he saw it. And Dan's face justified the move. He came in and
stood glowering at her, his hands in his pockets.

"I'll lock you up first," he said, angrily. "I've been expecting
something like that. I've watched you, and I've seen you watching
him. You'll not do it, do you hear? D'you think I'd let you get
away with that? Isn't it enough that he's got to support us,
without your coaxing him to marry you?"

She made no reply, but went on with a perfunctory laying of the
table. Her mouth had gone very dry.

"The poor fish," Dan snarled. "I thought he had some sense.
Letting himself in for a nice life, isn't he? We're not his kind,
and you know it. He knows more in a minute than you'll know all
your days. In about three months he'll hate the very sight of you,
and then where'll you be?"

When she made no reply, he called to the dog and went out into the
yard. She saw him there, brooding and sullen, and she knew that
he had not finished. He would say no more to her, but he would
wait and have it out with Willy himself.

Supper was silent. No one ate much, and Ellen, coming down with
the tray, reported Mrs. Boyd as very tired, and wanting to settle
down early.

"She looks bad to me," she said to Edith. "I think the doctor
ought to see her."

Edith was glad to get out of the house. She had avoided the
streets lately, but as it was the supper hour the pavements were
empty. Only Joe Wilkinson, bare-headed, stood in the next doorway,
and smiled and flushed slightly when he saw her.

She waited impatiently. She liked Joe, but she did not want him
then. She wanted to think and plan alone and in the open air,
away from the little house with its odors and its querulous
thumping cane upstairs; away from Ellen's grim face and Dan's
angry one.

He came out almost immediately, followed by a string of little
Wilkinsons, clamoring to go along.

"Do you mind?" he asked her. "They can trail along behind. The
poor kids don't get out much."

"Bring them along, of course," she said, somewhat resignedly. And
with a flash of her old spirit: "I might have brought Jinx, too.
Then we'd have had a real procession.

They moved down the street, with five little Wilkinsons trailing
along behind, and Edith was uncomfortably aware that Joe's eyes
were upon her.

But at that moment a very little Wilkinson fell headlong and burst
into loud, despairing wails. Joe set her on her feet, brushed her
down with a fatherly hand, and on her refusal to walk further picked
her up and carried her. The obvious impossibility of going on with
what he had been saying made him smile sheepishly.

"Can you beat it?" he said helplessly, "these darn kids - !" But
he held the child close.

At the next corner he turned toward home. Edith stopped and watched
his valiant young back, his small train of followers. He was going
to be very sad when he knew, poor Joe, with his vicarious fatherhood,
his cluttered, noisy, anxious life.

>From the doctor's office, the waiting room lined with patient figures,
she went on. She had a very definite plan in mind, but it took all
her courage to carry it through. Outside the Benedict Apartments she
hesitated, but she went in finally, upheld by sheer determination.

"Sometimes early, sometimes late," said Sam, watching her.
Everything pertaining to Louis Akers was of supreme interest those
days to the Benedict employees. The beating he had received, the
coming election, the mysterious young woman who had come but once,
and the black days that had followed his return from the St. Elmo
- out of such patchwork they were building a small drama of their
own. Sam was trying to fit in Edith's visit with the rest.

The Benedict was neither more moral nor less than its kind. An
unwritten law kept respectable women away, but the management showed
no inclination to interfere where there was no noise or disorder.
Employees were supposed to see that no feminine visitors remained
after midnight, that was all.

"No. Sam let her in and took her up. He said he thought you
wouldn't mind. She'd been here before."

The thought of Edith never entered Akers' head. It was Lily, Lily
miraculously come back to him. Lily, his wife.

Going up in the elevator he hastily formulated a plan of action.
He would not be too ready to forgive; she had cost him too much.
But in the end he would take her in his arms and hold her close.
Lily! Lily!

It was the bitterness of his disappointment that made him brutal.
Wicked and unscrupulous as he was with men, with women he was as
gentle as he was cruel. He put them from him relentlessly and
kissed them good-by. It was his boast that any one of them would
come back to him if he wanted her.

Edith, listening for his step, was startled at the change in his
face when he saw her.

It seemed to him incredible that she had come there to taunt him,
she who was responsible for the shipwreck of his marriage. That
she could come there and face him, and not expect him to kill her
where she stood.

"It's true enough." He swore under his breath. "She didn't leave
me. She was taken away. And I'll get her back if I - You little
fool, I ought to kill you. If you wanted a cheap revenge, you've got it."

"I wanted to be fair to him. And I think he is - I think he used
to be terribly in love with her."

Quite apart from his increasing fear of Willy Cameron and his
Committee, there had been in Akers for some time a latent jealousy
of him. In a flash he saw the room at the Saint Elmo, and a
cold-eyed man inside the doorway. The humiliation of that scene
had never left him, of his own maudlin inadequacy, of hearing from
beyond a closed and locked door, the closing of another door behind
Lily and the man who had taken her away from him. A mad anger and
jealousy made him suddenly reckless.

"Listen," he said deliberately. "Men who stick their heads into the
lion's jaws are apt to lose them. Our young friend Cameron has done
that. I'll change the figure. When a man tries to stop a great
machine by putting his impudent fingers into the cog wheels, the
man's a fool. He may lose his hand, or he may lose his life."

Fortunately for Edith he moved on that speech to the side table, and
mixed himself a highball. It gave her a moment to summon her
scattered wits, to decide on a plan of action. Her early training
on the streets, her recent months of deceit, helped her now. If he
had expected any outburst from her it did not come.

"You're a boaster," she said, with the door open. "You always
were. And you'll never lay a hand on him. You're like all bullies;
you're a coward!"

She was through the doorway by that time, and in terror for fear,
having told her so much, he would try to detain her. She saw the
idea come into his face, too, just as she slipped outside. He made
a move toward her.

She stumbled on the second flight of stairs and fell a half-dozen
steps, but she picked herself up and ran on. At the bottom of the
lower flight she stopped and listened, but he had gone back. She
heard the slam of his door as he closed it.

But the insistent need of haste drove her on, headlong. She shot
through the lobby, past the staring telephone girl, and into the
street, and there settled down into steady running, her elbows
close to her sides, trying to remember to breathe slowly and evenly.
She must get home somehow, get the envelope and follow the
directions inside. Her thoughts raced with her. It was almost
eleven o'clock and Willy had been gone for hours. She tried to
pray, but the words did not come.